Last year, Congress agreed to $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts, unless politicians find other things to cut. They didn’t, of course. So now, with so-called sequestration looming in January, panic has set in. Even the new “fiscally responsible” Republicans vote against cutting Energy Department handouts to companies like Solyndra and subsidies to sugar producers. Many claim that any cut in military spending will weaken America and increase unemployment.

It’s another demonstration of the politicians’ addiction to spending . . . “One more infrastructure bill” or “this jobs plan” will jumpstart the economy, and then we’ll kick our spending addiction once and for all.

But we don’t stop. . . .

Progressives say: If you’re so worried about the deficit, raise taxes! But it’s a fantasy to imagine that taxing the rich will solve our deficit problem. . . .

It’s the spending, stupid.

Even if you could balance the budget by taxing the rich, it wouldn’t be right. Progressives say it’s wrong for the rich to be “given” more money. But money earned belongs to those who earn it, not to government. Lower taxes are not a handout.

Politicians promise to balance the budget by getting rid of what is wasteful, redundant or unnecessary. There’s plenty of that, but they have promised to eliminate it for years. They cannot. It’s just in the nature of the beast. Centrally planned monopolies do things that are wasteful, redundant and unnecessary.

What will bankrupt us first are the wealth transfers to my generation: Medicare and Social Security. . . .

Few of us realize that most of us get back up to three times what we paid in, that politicians have promised Social Security and Medicare recipients an impossible $46 trillion more than will exist and that our sense of entitlement will ruin America much faster than foreign aid, subsidies for NPR or foreign wars ever will.

Amazingly, we could grow our way out of debt if Congress simply froze spending at today’s levels. That would balance the budget by 2017. . . .